Chapter Seven
THE MOVIE STUDIO claiming the professional services of a hopeful novice named Marilyn Monroe traced its origins to Wilhelm Fried, a Hungarian immigrant who had operated a penny arcade in Brooklyn at the turn of the century. By the end of World War I, he had changed his name to William Fox, and shortly thereafter founded a film corporation, moved West and was producing, leasing and exhibiting films in Hollywood. Among the stars who worked for him were Theda Bara, prototype of the enigmatic femme fatale; Annette Kellerman, the champion swimmer; cowboy Tom Mix; the sweetly vulnerable Janet Gaynor, who won the first Academy Award as best actress; and, in the early 1930s, the precocious tot Shirley Temple.
But by 1935, the depression and a serious accident altered Fox’s fortunes. He declared bankruptcy, and his Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures, a company established two years earlier by mogul Joseph M. Schenck (ex-husband of Norma Talmadge) and Darryl F. Zanuck, who had been production chief at Warner Bros.; Schenck became board chairman of the new Twentieth Century–Fox, Zanuck vice-president in charge of production. By 1943, Zanuck was the only one of the trio who had not served a prison term for tax fraud, bribery or illegal union payoffs.1
Marilyn Monroe joined the studio during the highest-grossing time in its history, when the recent successes of Laura, The House on 92nd Street, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Keys of the Kingdom and Leave Her to Heaven had brought in over twenty-two million dollars. The company was renowned and respected for its technical brilliance, for a series of successful glossy musicals, literate thrillers, gripping dramas and an impressive roster of stars and directors.2 But the first television sets were being marketed to American households, and a sharp drop in profits was about to affect all the studios.
The corporate fortunes depended largely on decisions made by one man who dominated the company for thirty-five years. In 1946, Nebraska-born Darryl F. Zanuck was forty-four, a short, sharp-minded, domineering, gap-toothed bundle of energy whose manner is perhaps best summarized by his habit of snapping at his staff: “Don’t agree with me until I’m finished talking!” He had been a screenwriter at Warners from 1923 to 1933, where his credits included several Rin Tin Tin adventures; indeed, Zanuck personally supervised the dog’s successful transition from silent to sound pictures.
The image of Zanuck held by screenwriter Ernest Lehman is vivid and compelling: he remembered Zanuck as a loud man with a big cigar who strode around the lot with a riding crop in his hand. “Zanuck had an aide who threw paper balls in the air for him to swing at with the crop while he walked. One day the man was fired, and the story circulated was that he had struck Darryl out!” Lehman remembered also Zanuck’s lengthy script conferences and involvement in every aspect of production.
Since he had taken over Fox’s operations (at 10201 Pico Boulevard, a ten-minute ride from where Marilyn lived and attended school), the volatile Zanuck was known to treat human colleagues with the same condescension he leveled on canines. Like many movie executives whose power could easily make and unmake careers, he exercised austerity in business dealings but indulged himself personally; this was especially so during early-evening conferences with hopeful starlets—meetings that sometimes included very personal business indeed. Zanuck was, according to his good friend, screenwriter Philip Dunne, “an energetic and promiscuous lover [but also] a genius in judging character. Like all great executives, he knew when to coddle, when to bully and when to exhort.”
Zanuck’s achievements as producer were indisputably impressive and won the studio more than thirty-two Oscars.3 In 1946, he was producing the award-winning film about anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement, directed by Elia Kazan. But Zanuck was also supervising other scripts, budgets, casting, editing and the final cut of almost fifty pictures annually, as well as authorizing every new studio contract; he approved more films for Technicolor production than any studio in town; and he attracted new directors while retaining veterans. Zanuck worked with remarkable independence of the company president, his former colleague Spyros Skouras, whom he had known at Warners and Twentieth Century; conversely, Skouras, chief financial officer of Fox, relied heavily on Zanuck’s creative instincts.
As for Marilyn Monroe, Zanuck scarcely noticed her: she was merely one of many contract players on the lot, and when casting for pictures he turned over her photograph quickly and without interest. Still, Marilyn now had a regular income, and in September she opened a checking account. But the year ended without a single assignment—not even a bit part in a crowd scene. “She was very serious about wanting to work,” according to her agent Harry Lipton, who added that she did not agree with those who thought it was a fine job that paid without performance. Although not required to report to the studio every day, she did so, as Allan Snyder recalled. Still living with Ana Lower, Marilyn took a bus or rode a bicycle, visiting the Fox wardrobe department to learn about period and contemporary costumes, fabrics and foundation garments. She asked questions of everyone with knowledge she coveted, anyone experienced who would give her a five-minute presentation on lighting, the moving camera, speech and diction.
“Desperate to absorb all she could” (thus Snyder), Marilyn also wanted to know the proper makeup techniques for black-and-white and for color cinematography. Known throughout the film industry (and later in television) for his technical brilliance in preparing actors’ makeup for a wide variety of roles, Snyder quickly became a mentor to the young apprentice. She trusted him, relied on his professional guidance and was grateful for his patience in demonstrating the secrets of movie cosmetology—although she had no assignment and he had a busy schedule.
“I could see at once that she was terribly insecure, that despite her modeling she didn’t think she was pretty. It took a lot of convincing for her to see the natural freshness and beauty she had, and how well she could be used in [moving] pictures.” Snyder was touched by Marilyn’s conspicuous lack of self-confidence, her childlike wonder at the enchantments and transformations possible through movie crafts. He also saw a determination and an ability to meet the weekly disappointment of “no call”—even as she persisted in learning all she could about something of which she knew nothing. Like Shamroy and Lyon, Snyder saw a rare, luminous quality in her, something vague and indefinable, a woman’s experience and a child’s needs. He and Marilyn Monroe had for sixteen years a deep and abiding friendship uncomplicated by romance from the first day of her career to the end of her life.4
Others at Fox during late 1946 and early 1947 saw her fervor for a job and her eagerness to be included in the studio activity; for Marilyn, an assignment signaled acceptance within a circle from which she felt excluded. John Campbell, a staff publicist, recalled that she haunted the press offices daily, wearing a tight sweater and asking about publicity procedures. Campbell found her friendly and did not wish to be rude, but there was no mandate from the front office about her, and so she was, to the publicists, a bit of a nuisance.
But she was not so to the Fox still photographers, who were often asked to provide magazines, newspapers and advertising agencies with glossies of attractive contract players. For them, Marilyn happily posed in the tiniest bathing suits or a negligée almost as transparent as cellophane. Predictably, the most daring shots could not be used, but meantime both the photographers and their subject had no complaint on the tasks. With typical cunning, the Fox publicists created copy that was charmingly variant: one photo of Marilyn in a two-piece swimsuit graced the Los Angeles Times on January 30, 1947—with the hilarious headline, “Baby Sitter Lands in Films.” The accompanying blurb, excising two years from her age, explained that this “18-year-old blond baby sitter walked into a studio talent scout’s home” and was at once on the road to stardom. But to this there would be no short route.
In February 1947, Fox exercised the right to renew her contract for six months, and several days later she finally received a casting call. Marilyn Monroe’s first film role was as a high-school girl in a minor picture called Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! Wisely retitled Summer Lightning by British distributors, the Technicolor picture concerns a farming family with half-brothers battling over how best to raise mules.5 For several days in March, Marilyn reported to the studio, where she was directed by F. Hugh Herbert in two scenes that contributed nothing to a fatally tedious narrative. In one sequence, she was photographed with another starlet in a rowboat: this bit was entirely removed from the final cut of the film. The second scene survived, in which she can be glimpsed and heard for only a second—walking swiftly behind leading lady June Haver and eight-year-old Natalie Wood and calling to Haver, “Hi, Rad!” Only the most alert viewer could have noticed the uncredited Marilyn Monroe, who is offscreen before Haver can reply, “Hi, Peggy!”6
Her career was not abetted by her second film for Fox. In May 1947, Marilyn breezed through three short scenes in Dangerous Years, a drearily earnest melodrama about juvenile delinquency. As a waitress named Eve at a teenage hangout called The Gopher Hole, she takes no nonsense from the boys. When one invites her for a date after work, she replies that he cannot afford it; moments later, the same cocky lad orders soda for himself and another girl, boasting to Eve/Marilyn, “I said I had money!” She looks him over with cool scorn, tosses her long, blond hair and with a baritonic sassiness worthy of another Eve (the actress named Arden) cuts him down to size: “Yeah, and now you blow it on two Cokes!” Her confident acerbity provides the only laugh in an otherwise turgid, verbose film that was soon forgotten. Dangerous Years (in which “Marilyn Monroe” was the fourteenth name in the opening credits) was released in December 1947, four months before Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!
Neither picture helped her or the producers, and in August 1947 the studio did not renew Marilyn’s contract. “When I told her that Fox had not taken up the option,” recalled Harry Lipton, “her immediate reaction was that the world had crashed around her. But typical of Marilyn, she shook her head, set her jaw and said, ‘Well, I guess it really doesn’t matter—it’s a case of supply and demand.’ ” However whole-hearted her energies and fervent her desire for success, she was a realist who recognized that she was part of an underbooked team of contract players. When the studio’s fiscal revaluation called for the dismissal of a certain number of unprofitable employees, she was among them. Her last paycheck, one hundred four dollars and thirteen cents after deductions, was dated August 31, 1947.
Her unemployment did not leave her idle, however. Since January, the studio had been sending some of its young actors over to the modest quarters of the Actors Laboratory (on Crescent Heights Boulevard, just south of Sunset), where playwrights, actors and directors from Broadway had a California showcase for their work. In January, Marilyn had seen at the Actors Lab a one-act play by Tennessee Williams called Portrait of a Madonna, in which Hume Cronyn directed his wife, Jessica Tandy; much revised and expanded, the play opened in New York the following December as A Streetcar Named Desire.
Throughout 1947, Marilyn attended informal classes, read plays and studied scenes with an impressive group of experienced actors from New York. This contact was crucial not only for her exposure to the theater and some of its most controversial and intelligent exponents: her time at the Actors Lab also introduced her to social and political issues that later determined several important choices in both her career and her personal life. “It was as far from Scudda-Hoo as you could get,” she said later. “It was my first taste of what real acting in real drama could be, and I was hooked.”
Most important, these months evoked new aspects of her maturing character that would constantly be threatened throughout her life. In Marilyn Monroe there was a deep conflict, for she was torn between the performer’s desire for approval and acceptance and a craving for learning and serious artistic achievement. Ashamed of her aborted schooling, she was always attracted to educated men and women from whom she might learn about literature, the theater, history and social issues. In addition, there was in her nature a deeply felt concern for the poor, the weak, the abandoned and disenfranchised—people with whom she always identified both in life and in stories. All these longings and concerns came together in 1947 through the actors she met at the Lab and the kind of drama they championed.
The Actors Lab was a spinoff of the Group Theater in New York. Under its founding directors Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, the Group—and its leading playwright of social protest, Clifford Odets—offered plays championing the plight of the poor, plays with sharply left-wing messages against capitalism. Although after a decade the troupe formally disbanded in 1940, its members continued to be vital forces in the development of American theater, and during the following decade several of the Group’s actors—Morris Carnovsky and his wife, Phoebe Brand; J. Edward Bromberg and Roman Bohnen—tutored students, led scene studies and presented plays for Los Angeles students and theatergoers.
It is impossible to overestimate the impact of Marilyn’s exposure to these New York theater people, to the plays studied and presented and to a company of professionals that was somewhat ragtag but dynamic and full of new ideas. Over ten months in 1947, under the tutelage of Phoebe Brand and her colleagues, Marilyn read and studied—however casually, incompletely and irregularly—at least portions of the following plays that had earlier been offered by the Group Theater in New York:
• 1931, by Claire and Paul Sifton, a play first produced in the year of the title, which explored the problems of an unemployed depression laborer and his girlfriend who finally join Communist sympathizers in New York. Marilyn learned that the New York production had starred Carnovsky, Bromberg, Brand and Odets—a quartet she met one evening that June after a reading of the play.
• Night Over Taos (1932) by Maxwell Anderson, about a revolt against land-grabbers. This play had, in addition to the same cast as 1931, an actress named Paula Miller who was soon to marry the play’s original director, Lee Strasberg. The Strasbergs would eventually become the two most influential people in her acting career.
• Men in White (1933) by Sidney Kingsley, about a young doctor’s struggle with idealism; to the same cast as the previous two was added a young actor named Elia Kazan. Marilyn already knew of him because he had been at Fox when she arrived, directingGentleman’s Agreement. At the Actors Lab, he was spoken of in almost reverential terms, as a genius of the theater and cinema, an accomplished actor, director and producer. Then thirty-eight, he had returned to New York and was co-founding a new school, the Actors Studio. Kazan and the Studio would also be significant in her personal and professional life.
• Awake and Sing! (1935) by Odets, in which the identical cast played a Bronx family struggling to survive the depression; at the finale, the hero becomes a left-wing agitator. Years later, Marilyn recalled that she wept at the play’s “crazy, destroyed family, and especially at the suicide of that kind old grandfather,” who may well have made her think of her own family and of Tilford Hogan.
• Weep for the Virgins (1935) by Nellise Child, in which Phoebe Brand and Paula Miller, under Cheryl Crawford’s direction, played members of a San Diego family trying to escape the drab environment of a fish cannery during the depression.
• The Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), by Erwin Piscator and Lena Goldschmidt, in which Brand, Carnovsky, Bohnen and Kazan reinterpreted Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy in terms of the American class struggle.
• Golden Boy (1937), in which the same players (again directed by Strasberg) presented Odets’s drama of a man’s choice between a career as a violinist or as a prizefighter.
In her discussions of this play, Phoebe Brand suggested to the students that this career conflict was present in every serious actor, in every serious artist—indeed, in Odets himself, who was torn between the serious demands of writing for Broadway and the lucrative business of writing for Hollywood. “She asked us to read his play Clash by Night, which had starred Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway,” Marilyn recalled. “It was one of the few plays I thought I could do, because there was the part of a girl who reminded me of myself.”
As Marilyn attended class, studied and asked questions, the same themes resurfaced (social discontent and the plight of the disenfranchised poor) and the same names recurred—Odets and the Strasbergs; Cheryl Crawford; and Elia Kazan. For the present, she came to know only Phoebe Brand and her husband, Morris Carnovsky; at the Lab, Carnovsky was habitually late for rehearsals and tutorials while his wife constantly enjoined punctuality on their students.
For Marilyn, a child of the depression, these plays and discussions had a force and relevance unlike the movies she had acted in, had seen produced at Fox or in movie theaters.
All I could think of was this far, far away place called New York, where actors and directors did very different things than stand around all day arguing about a closeup or a camera angle. I had never seen a play, and I don’t think I knew how to read one very well. But Phoebe Brand and her company somehow made it all very real. It seemed so exciting to me, and I wanted to be part of that life. But I’d never even been out of California.7
To the staff at the Lab, Marilyn seemed shy and self-conscious. According to Phoebe Brand, “she did all her assignments conscientiously” but made no great impression:
I remember her for her beautiful long blond hair. . . . I tried to get through to her and find out more about her, but I couldn’t do it. She was extremely retiring. What I failed to see in her acting was her wit, her sense of humor. It was there all the time—this lovely comedic style, but I was blind to it.8
The Actors Lab was Marilyn’s first introduction to acting as a disciplined and demanding enterprise requiring serious application. Her two roles at Fox had been throwaways, and as she knew from observing others in production, film actors had to remember only a line or two of dialogue at a time. Whereas a day on a movie set could extend to ten or even twelve hours (and the work-week to six days in 1947), the actual working time was brief. Actors were late, lights had to be readjusted, cameras were temperamental, script rewrites were demanded: in such a collaborative medium, executives were delighted if a day’s work produced four minutes of finished film. (The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had worked in Hollywood, once described movie-making as an enterprise in which very many people stand around for a very long time, doing absolutely nothing.)
Practitioners of stagecraft, on the other hand, read, memorized and broke down scenes for analysis, discussed them with the director and designer and, it seemed to Marilyn, generally immersed themselves in a much less lucrative and far more demanding profession. “Movie stars were paid better, and of course the people at the Actors Lab made no secret of how much they resented that,” Marilyn said, adding that she felt a conflict very like that in Odets’s Golden Boy: should she aim for the art or the stardom?
Because she did not want to return to modeling (much less to any other job), Marilyn would not have been able to attend classes at the Actors Lab—much less to feed, clothe and house herself after she was dropped from the Fox roster—were it not for a chance encounter with a generous couple in early August.
This occurred at an annual celebrity golf tournament at the Cheviot Hills Country Club, just across the boulevard from Fox. For the event, pretty young contract players were invited to carry actors’ clubs and bags, making themselves agreeable to the likes of Henry Fonda, James Stewart, John Wayne and Tyrone Power. Two weeks before her contract expired that summer, Marilyn was one of the caddies sent over with the compliments of Twentieth Century–Fox.
She was assigned to John Carroll, a handsome, six-foot-four-inch, forty-two-year-old film actor whose virile good looks were often compared to those of Clark Gable or George Brent. Carroll, a wealthy man who had made wise investments, was married to Lucille Ryman, director of the Talent Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her responsibilities included finding new men and women with star potential (she had signed up Lana Turner, June Allyson and Janet Leigh), then obtaining good scripts for them and supervising their drama, dance, fencing and diction classes at the studio. The Carrolls were also known and admired for helping (with both counsel and cash) several young, impecunious apprentices who showed some promise of movie talent.
Years later, Lucille clearly recalled that Marilyn wore a tight sweater and white flared shorts to the tournament—but that she was unable to manage Carroll’s heavy golf bag and simply carried a few clubs, occasionally striking attractive poses for the benefit of the attending press. Along with Marilyn’s obvious allure and her evident awareness of it, Lucille Ryman saw a certain childlike simplicity, “the look of a lost waif.” Her sexiness, her delight in herself and her ability to attract attention were somehow neither offensive nor impertinent. “She was such a cute little number,” according to Lucille. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this poor little child, this stray kitten.’ ”
At the end of the day, everyone gathered for drinks round the club bar, and finally Marilyn—the object of considerable male attention—quietly announced to the Carrolls that she had no transportation home, and that she had not eaten since the previous day. Because Lucille had to leave the club to attend a play downtown that evening with a studio colleague, she suggested that John and Marilyn ought to go out for supper before he drove her home.
Which they did, according to Lucille. Later, John told his wife the dialogue that accompanied his delivery of Marilyn to her apartment. This was not at Nebraska Avenue, but at a seedy place in Hollywood to which she had moved in June. She invited him to come in, but he replied that he was tired after the long day and eager to return home.
“But how can I thank you if you don’t come in?” Marilyn asked. John understood the offer but declined it.
“She made a play for him very quickly,” according to Lucille, “but there was one very important quality about John she didn’t take into account: he did not like such overt behavior.”
Lucille did not think Marilyn was right for MGM: “She was cute and sexy, but she didn’t have the leading lady quality that Mr. Mayer was signing up in 1947.” Nevertheless, Lucille and John occasionally helped young actors find a start in the business, and so they invited her to dinner in early September. Marilyn told them how serious she was about her career and how much she loved the Actors Laboratory; she added that she was an orphan with no money, and that she had to leave Nebraska Avenue when her Aunt Ana went into a hospital and new tenants took over the house.
Marilyn then added quite calmly that she put all her money into classes, rent and auto maintenance, and that she got food by offering herself for quick sex with men in cars on side streets near Hollywood or Santa Monica Boulevard. “She really did this for her meals,” according to Lucille. “It wasn’t for cash. She told us without pride or shame that she made a deal—she did what she did, and her customer then bought her breakfast or lunch.” This period of her life she also discussed a few years later with her acting teacher Lee Strasberg: “Marilyn was a call girl . . . and her call-girl background worked against her.”
Before the Carrolls could comment, Marilyn told them that she was terrified of returning to her little apartment. Attempting to cash her last Fox paycheck, she had asked a Hollywood policeman if a local bank might help, although she had no account there. He asked her name and telephone number and cashed the check himself for her; money in hand, she thanked the policeman and left. That night, the same man broke into her apartment and tried to attack her; he fled by a rear door only when Marilyn shrieked so loudly a neighbor came to the front. “I don’t know,” Marilyn concluded. “I have to have a place to sleep. And I have to eat and have a car and pay my way at class. I suppose I’ll have to go on working the Boulevard.” She paused again. “I’ve decided to change my name. To Journey Evers.”
The Carrolls were authentic Good Samaritans, and at once they took action. They lived most of the time at their Granada Hills horse-breeding ranch in the San Fernando Valley, but they also had a top-floor apartment in town at the El Palacio, an elegant Spanish structure at the northeast corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Fountain Avenue. So that Marilyn could continue to attend classes and be available for auditions when Harry Lipton called—without having to “work the Boulevard”—the Carrolls invited her to live rent-free in the apartment’s second suite. As Lucille recalled, “She said she was raped at nine and had sex every day at the age of eleven, all of which she later admitted was untrue. It was a way of getting us to take her in, to keep her off the streets of Hollywood, and it worked.” Marilyn Monroe was a vulnerable soul, to be sure; but she was also savvy enough to know which tales evoked a sympathetic reaction from this or that person.
According to their records, the Carrolls gave her cash all that September (eighty dollars on September 2; fifty on the fifteenth; another eighty on the twenty-sixth and seventy-five on the twenty-seventh). That autumn, they asked their representative, Albert Blum, to draw up a letter of agreement. They would pay to “Journey Evers, also known as Norma Jeane Dougherty” the regular sum of one hundred dollars weekly “for personal management.” Should she find employment through Blum or the Carrolls, she could repay the money and ten percent would be duly paid to her agent Harry Lipton. Gladys’s daughter had never known such generous support.
Things happened quickly that September. On the twenty-first, Lucille noticed a casting call for a student performance of the 1940 comedy Glamour Preferred, to be performed at the Bliss-Hayden Miniature Theater (later the site of the Beverly Hills Playhouse) on Robertson Boulevard. She immediately telephoned Lila Bliss and her husband Harry Hayden, who welcomed Lucille’s protégés to classes and allowed them to perform onstage without charge because Lucille occasionally brought one of the students over to MGM. The Haydens met Marilyn and days later cast her (with considerable aptness, in light of her invitation to John Carroll) in the supporting role of a Hollywood starlet whose seduction of a glamorous leading man is foiled by the man’s sensible and superior wife.
The month’s run of this amateur production was scheduled to begin on October 12, but rehearsals were stymied by Marilyn’s chronic lateness and her apparent inability to memorize lines. As Lucille learned after a long discussion with her, both problems arose from the girl’s fear of dressing ineptly (she changed clothes several times before leaving the apartment), from a dread of looking unacceptable (she retouched her makeup for hours) and from her terror of failure. In fact she knew the dialogue perfectly, but she stuttered and paused so much that she threw the other student players into total confusion. Marilyn finally managed to stumble her way through two performances which were mercifully unreviewed by the Los Angeles press.9 A few years later, she said that it was a terrible play in any case, and that she only took the role from a sense of obligation to the Carrolls. Her statement did not justify her tardiness, but her critical assessment was on the mark: Glamour Preferred had sunk from sight after an original Broadway run of eleven performances; it has (but for Bliss and Hayden) vanished into oblivion.10
As the autumn passed, the Carrolls found themselves indulgent surrogate parents to Marilyn, who was now begging to spend weekends with them at their ranch so she would not be alone. Lucille and John valued some privacy, however, and they had many tasks as their ranch expanded. One evening Lucille arrived at the apartment to find Marilyn hovering over an array of twenty-five brassieres, for which she had spent an entire week’s allowance. Into each bra Marilyn was packing a wad of tissue, so that her breasts would seem to protrude more perkily. “I sat her down,” Lucille remembered, “and told her this was all very silly.” Marilyn’s reply was simple: “But this is all anyone ever looks at! When I walk down Hollywood Boulevard, everyone will notice me now!”
In November, the Carrolls received a telephone call at the ranch one Friday evening. Marilyn said in a nervous whisper that a teenage Peeping Tom had climbed a ladder and was looking through her bedroom window. The Carrolls knew that no ladder would reach to the third floor, that this was simply Marilyn’s ploy to avoid loneliness and to join them at the ranch. But her recent mention of walking down Hollywood Boulevard alarmed them as much as the fantasy about a Peeping Tom, and Lucille feared that their little stray kitten might become a permanent alleycat; that never having known the secure love of a father at home, Marilyn might seek endlessly for affirmation from men who wanted nothing more than a few moments with her body. At twenty-one she was still drifting, even as she longed for professional and personal stability, and so by December Lucille welcomed Marilyn every weekend at Granada Hills.
At the same time, Marilyn sought constantly to have the Carrolls’ devotion reaffirmed, to be reassured they would not abandon her, for they were indeed surrogate parents. But her conduct was not always apposite. Around the Carroll home she dressed scantily, slept nude with her door open and generally scandalized John Carroll’s mother, who was also visiting. By early 1948, as Lucille Ryman Carroll summarized the situation years later,
Marilyn had become a problem for us. She called me at my office, and John at the studio, as often as four times a day, even though we repeatedly asked her not to. We were in a trap we had unwittingly stepped into. Finally, we had no control over her: she controlled us.
Part of the control was exercised in her blunt disregard for schedules (her own and others’) and her occasional affectation of a mysterious and elusive attitude. After waiting hours for her to arrive at the ranch on several Friday evenings, the Carrolls received a call: “This weekend I’m going to be with some people,” she said vaguely. There was no need for mystery: “Being with some people,” according to Lucille, “meant she was going to be with a photographer for two or three days. The following Monday we found her room littered with photos of herself she studied day and night.”
But then Marilyn got the strange idea that her life with the Carrolls was about to alter dramatically. “Somehow,” according to Lucille,
because John rather than I had invited her out to the ranch one weekend, she thought this was going to be the beginning of an affair with him. She came to me and said, “Lucille, I want to ask if you’ll give John a divorce. I don’t think you love him—if you did you wouldn’t work so hard at your job, and you’d be with him every night instead of going out to shows and screenings. And I think he loves me. He didn’t say he does, but he’s so patient and he helps me so much. He couldn’t do that if he didn’t love me.”
Lucille’s answer was delivered calmly: if John wanted a divorce he had only to ask for it. When Marilyn went back to John, he explained that his feelings were strictly those of a mentor, that all he wanted was to assist her career and to help her materially. “And the amazing thing,” according to Lucille, “is that Marilyn didn’t seem bothered by this at all. She wasn’t heartbroken, as if a great love were being denied her.” In fact, she may well have been relieved. With such a background as Marilyn had, she was ill equipped to read ordinary social signals, and many of them were subjected to a reading through the lens of her need for masculine acceptance and affirmation.
After five months of caring night and day for Marilyn, it was clear to the Carrolls that, as Lucille said, “we were in too deep and had to get out.” The social life in which they often included her was soon to provide help in that direction. At a party in February 1948, John introduced Marilyn to a businessman named Pat De Cicco, who was successful with a product called Bon Bons, candy-sized ice cream confections marketed chiefly at movie theaters. De Cicco had become a friend of Fox’s executive producer, Joseph Schenck, whom Marilyn had met briefly on the studio lot.
Schenck’s Spanish-Italian Renaissance mansion at 141 South Carol-wood Drive was the setting for legendary Saturday-night poker games, to which he and his friends invited attractive young women to keep the highball glasses full and the ashtrays empty. De Cicco asked Marilyn to join him the following Saturday. And so it happened that the former Fox starlet was reintroduced to the present Fox mogul. “I was invited as an ornament,” Marilyn said, “just someone to brighten the party.” And so she did—especially for Schenck, who (as Lucille Ryman Carroll knew within days) “went for Marilyn like a million dollars.”
Schenck, then sixty-nine, had a long and influential career. He and his brother Nicholas, childhood Russian émigrés to New York, had owned some drugstores and operated amusement parks before their association with Marcus Loew, executive of a theater chain that became the parent company of MGM. Nicholas remained with Loew, but in 1917 Joe became an independent producer, successful with, among others, the films of his wife Norma Talmadge; his brother-in-law, Buster Keaton; and the comic Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle. By 1948, Joe Schenck had been at various times board chairman of United Artists, president of Twentieth Century Pictures and then board chairman of Twentieth Century–Fox, where he was still a major power. Bald, with large features and penetrating gray eyes, Joe Schenck had a severe mouth that belied a keen sense of humor and good business sense, both of which were epitomized by advice he gave a friend: “If four or five guys tell you that you’re drunk, even though you know you haven’t had a thing to drink, the least you can do is to lie down a little while.” Accustomed to deferential treatment, he could be crude and demanding or gentle and helpful, depending on what opinion he thought someone had of him.
Marilyn was not the only young woman present that Saturday evening; there were other models, starlets and pretty young things hoping for entrée to a movie career or advancement in it. Besides distributing drinks and cigars, some were willing (not to say expected) to provide more intimate services for one or another of the cardplayers during a break in the game. That evening, Marilyn remained close to De Cicco and tried gracefully to ignore the host’s suggestive glances.
Next day, a limousine was dispatched to bring Marilyn to a private dinner with Joe Schenck—an invitation she knew it would have been folly to refuse. “What do I do after dinner when he gets around to what he really wants?” she asked Lucille, who suggested the reply she often gave her MGM starlets: “Tell him you’re a virgin, saving yourself for the right man.” Late that night, Lucille was awakened by an agitated Marilyn, whispering into a private phone from Schenck’s home: “He knows I’ve been married! Nowwhat do I tell him?” The evening ended, perhaps predictably, with Marilyn’s submission.
Later, she told Lucille and a few other confidantes that this was the first of many times she had to kneel before an executive, a position not assumed in prayerful supplication. She wanted desperately to work, to succeed as a movie star, and she accepted the fact that sometimes employment conditions are negotiated privately, not in an agent’s office. “Marilyn spoke quite openly of her affair with Schenck,” recalled Amy Greene, later a close friend. “He helped her career and she provided what she was asked to provide.”
Inveterate womanizer though he was—and Marilyn was but one of many conquests—Joe Schenck did not toss her aside, and in fact she grew quite fond of him. Although he had an agreement with Zanuck not to press for girlfriends to be given preferential treatment, Schenck called his poker buddy Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios. In late February, Marilyn arrived at Cohn’s office at the corner of Sunset and Gower. One of the most feared and disliked men in the history of Hollywood, Cohn had been responsible for molding the career of a dancer named Margarita Cansino, who became Rita Hayworth. He was willing to offer Marilyn a six-month contract at one hundred twenty-five dollars a week beginning March 9. There was, however, one condition—and not the one she at first expected.
The following week, her hairline was permanently heightened by electrolysis and, after several applications of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, the basic brown of Marilyn’s cheaply dyed blond hair was entirely stripped away. The mirror showed her a woman more and more like the favored star of her childhood, Jean Harlow. “So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” Harlow asked rhetorically, gazing in a hand mirror in the 1932 film Red Headed Woman—and then she turned to the camera, smiled and replied, “Yes, they do!”
Harry Cohn was no gentleman, but he preferred Marilyn blond. Having approved her new look, he dispatched her to three studio offices. After Max Arnow in the Talent Department had compiled a page of statistics on this latest contract player and the men in publicity had arranged for some trial photographs, Marilyn arrived at the cozy cottage of Columbia’s drama coach, a formidable lady named Natasha Lytess who had interests far more serious than dying hair.
1. The on-screen emblem, the studio advertising and the lot’s marquee always identified the company as “20th Century—Fox,” but for legal reasons the contracts, documents and stationery had to designate it as “Twentieth Century—Fox.” In 1984, the hyphen which since 1935 had marked the merger was removed.
2. Among the most popular contract players were Don Ameche, Anne Baxter, Alice Faye, Henry Fonda, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda, Gregory Peck, Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney and Loretta Young; directors included Henry Hathaway, Elia Kazan, Anatole Litvak, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Otto Preminger.
3. Among the best-known Zanuck films up to 1946: The House of Rothschild, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jesse James, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road and How Green Was My Valley.
4. Years later, Snyder summarized the process of making up Marilyn Monroe: a light base, then a highlight under the eyes and out, over and across the cheekbones. This was followed by a toning to the eyeshadow, running lightly out toward the hairline, an outline in pencil round the eyes, brows slightly pointed to widen her forehead, a toning underneath the cheekbones, and delicate shadings according to costume and lighting. Lipstick colors varied; later, CinemaScope presented fresh challenges.
5. The American title refers to farmers’ shouts when they goad mule teams—the equivalent of the standard “giddy-up!” for horses.
6. Perhaps thinking of her initials and her self-appointed sobriquet as “the Mmmmm Girl,” Marilyn wrongly stated (on Edward R. Murrow’s television interview Person to Person in 1955) that her first lines in any film were “Mmmmm” in Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!, “but they were cut.”
7. She had, of course, traveled outside California several times.
8. No records have survived of the class assignments or scene studies at the Actors Lab, and Marilyn never listed those few in which she appeared.
9. Several students routinely undertook the same role, each of them appearing in repertory so that different performances could be later compared in class discussions. Other film actors who occasionally appeared at Bliss-Hayden were Veronica Lake, Jon Hall, Doris Day, Craig Stevens and Debbie Reynolds.
10. After its 1940 premiere, one New York critic wrote that “joke after tired joke is laboriously lifted from its sarcophagus and spun out of its winding sheet until the stage is crowded with verbal mummies” (New York Post, Nov. 16, 1940).